Who wouldn’t want their work to have a positive effect on the world? We always kept conscious design choices a priority, trying to use as few materials as possible. We did this while creating a bike that stands out – one that’s perfect for everyday urban commuting and tours. But we’re always thinking: “What could we improve next?” and “What is the most significant thing we can do?” So we started to look into Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) to understand further our environmental impact and how we can improve it.
From ecodesign to life cycle assessment
As a business, you of course can make environmentally good design choices with other, more simple tools – even before an LCA (Life Cycle Analysis). You can start with life cycle thinking, eco-design principles, eco-indicators, and more.
An LCA is a tool to dig deeper. It measures the impact that a product has on the environment throughout its whole life cycle (from raw material, through production and use, up to recycling, burning or landfilling). It shows us the different effects in clear numbers. This is how we can understand our full impact better and get an idea of the “hotspots” (where we cause the most emissions and other harmful impacts) so we know where to focus our efforts. It’s a science-based, widely used and holistic tool. Seeing the direction we can head in, we were getting excited!
But there are challenges. There’s little information about e-bikes’ environmental impact to begin with. For example, most of the public LCAs don’t consider the care and repair of bikes very extensively. It was always going to be difficult to map the entire supply chain. We are talking about thousands of materials and components often sourced from many different suppliers. In any case, the information out there wasn’t fully usable for guiding our actions. We feel that this information should be public, as much as possible, to create a collaborative advantage for the whole industry. In this way, we can develop better awareness about the environmental impacts of the cycling industry and focus on solutions for faster improvements.
That’s partly why we decided to do a full Life Cycle Analysis of our Ampler e-bike. The intention is to be fully transparent about our findings. Scientists today agree that we have no more than 8 years to avoid the worst effects of climate change. We believe life cycle information will help us focus on the right things and help others do the same, but doing a full LCA is complex, requires expertise and takes time to develop.
It may take too long if every company analyzes their processes with an LCA, after all, we need to make an impact at an industrial scale. We believe sharing information and resources will help empower our customers, team members, suppliers and peer companies to work on solutions faster.
What did we learn?
This was our first time doing a full LCA and we decided to use an external expert to guide us on this journey. We chose to use openLCA (an open-source sustainability assessment tool) and GreenDelta, the consultant agency behind building the tool. We did a simplified analysis by focusing on the most important processes and materials and using average industry data. It’s a common approach to start with and get a rough first understanding of the “hotspots”. Then, the model can be specified, for example by engaging with suppliers for more data and information. This can gradually get us closer to the truth of what’s happening in our supply chain.
The LCA revealed a few surprising things and made clear what our hotspots are. For example, we had focused on reducing the plastics in our packaging. This is a quite common starting point when you focus on sustainability, as it is easier to improve. Packaging is often less complex than the core product. But this accounted for only 1% of our environmental impact. Instead, our top 5 challenges are:
- Using aluminium, particularly for the frames, which is very energy intensive to produce (although it’s good for recycling).
- Transporting components to our factory via air freight.
- Powering our assembly factory with electricity from the Estonian grid (Estonia still uses a lot of fossil fuels to run the grid).
- Charging the bikes with non-renewable energy.
- Burning waste materials, such as tire rubber.
You can read the full LCA report here. But let’s look at some simple figures below to understand the big picture.
We’re in the business of tackling the climate crisis so we aim to focus on greenhouse gas emissions first. In the case of bikes, here’s an overview of the carbon footprint of an Ampler bike (production, use, transport and disposal).
The study also confirms that we are on the right track with key elements, such as making our bikes lightweight, durable and minimalistic. We also found a few scenarios that could help us lower the carbon footprint of the bike: recycled materials, renewable energy, reduced scrap rates and moving beyond air freight.
So now the question is: how can we use this LCA to add value for our customers as well as the industry itself?
Beyond LCAs: next steps
We believe we have a clear case for what we should initially change and why. We aim to reach out to our suppliers, other companies and customers and find ways of implementing solutions together. But there’s still a long way to go. By doing the LCA, we have some ideas about the next steps and where we need industry collaboration.
However, the carbon footprint of a bike is only a small part of the carbon emitted by the whole mobility sector. The most important number in our sector to look at is the overall carbon emissions of transport in general. We should all focus on the factors that help us create a cleaner mobility system. This means urban design, infrastructure for walking and biking, public transport, culture and defining what our industry stands up for. We need to be responsible for our own design choices and emissions while advocating overall positive change to transport. We have 8 years to create a better future, let’s make our focus clear.